Summary: Rock-rap group ZZ formed in the industrial city of Fuji, about 100-km west of Tokyo, in 1998, soon relocating to the much larger Shizuoka where they built up a local following playing the city’s clubs. Within two years the band were playing at venues in Tokyo’s Shimokitazawa district, an area that is a mecca for underground bands, sharing the bill with the likes of popular rap-metal act RIZE. Even so, ZZ’s pop sensibility means they have more in common musically with the sound of the mega-selling, self-styled “mixture hip-hop” group ORANGE RANGE than the harder, alternative metal of RIZE.
After independently releasing a mini-album and single in 2000, the career of ZZ (comprised of vocalist SOTARO, guitarist KOHSUKE, pianist ERICHI, bassist KYAMA and drummer MATSUURA) gained momentum when Japan’s biggest monthly rock magazine, Rockin’ On, glowingly reviewed their second single, “Brightest” in early 2001. It’s follow-up “Himawari (Sunflower)” went top 75 in the USEN charts (a request chart) and was picked up by one of Tokyo’s major commercial radio stations, BayFM. The station would go on to grant the group their own regular program, titled “Na Na Na Now Young” in October of that year, but not before they had dropped their debut album, “Absolute Beat Complex.”
ZZ made the step up to large independent label Avex in 2003 for the release of the single “Rhythmist,” which was the band’s biggest hit to date, going top 10 in the USEN charts. The single was a taster for the album “Definitive Energy Flow,” which the group supported by going on their first nationwide tour. Having had a couple of songs featured as opening/ending songs on Japanese television programs, the group scored a minor coup when their tune “A to Z” was chosen as the ending song to the animated adventure television series “ONE PIECE,” which, like many popular anime, has been adapted into English, Chinese and Korean. Appropriately, ZZ played their first live shows in South Korea in 2004. (Two years earlier they had played to 8,000 people at a music festival in Dalian, China.)
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